[virtualritz]

> [...] the Internet made it trivially easy to data-mine subcultures [...] diluting their special meaning, [...]

It is a curious coincidence that the birth of the WWW (the part of the internet that enabled this) is temporally close to the collapse of the alternative system and thus the establishing of the "only viable alternative" (capitalism):

> This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.[1].

[1] Quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism p. 6.